Bard's Tale The Bard's Tale IV Pre-Release Thread [RELEASED, GO TO NEW THREAD]

[Strange Fellow]

What an insightful preview by Polygon. "There are characters. There are dungeons. There are classes and skill trees and bard songs and abilities and combat and consumables. Yes, indeed - my years of experience as an avid RPG entusiast has enabled me to successfully identify this game as an old school RPG. How about that?"

Small blue circles on the ground indicate where to go if you’d like to follow the main path

Hehe

Turns out it really was too much to expect that journos would be familiar even with 3d M&Ms and Wizardry 8, let alone the originals.

And again with fucking Dark Souls. Always Dark Souls. Did you know the shortcut was invented in 2010 by From Software?

Watching "professional" gaming journalists flailing to find something - anything - to compare this game to, and failing so miserably, is just pathetic.

 

[Infinitron]

Gameplay videos:

 

[Jack Dandy]

The combat honestly looks pretty damn fun!
Although I can see it isn't gonna be your standard kind of "Lots of repetitive encounters but at least the end quickly" sort of deal.

But I never really was into these kinds of crawlers anyway, so this might just work great for me.

 

[Rivmusique]

blobborne

 

[Strange Fellow]

More gems:

You quickly learn how to move your party members around the grid, learning when to move them forward, back, or out of the direct line of sight of enemies. It’s an intricate system – an interesting Westernized version of a traditional JRPG combat system.

The original Bard's Tale trilogy was developed by Interplay and published by Electronic Arts in the mid-to-late '80s. Despite being hard as nails, that trilogy is generally seen as a hidden gem among classic RPGs. They had incredible music, writing,

Pls stop

 

[Zombra]

Turns out I made a mistake and don't have beta access, so y'all will have to wait to hear my brilliant and universally respected hands-on observations.

 

[Zombra]

RPG where the dialogue window is just a large button saying "continue"... this is fucking ridiculous and will fail miserably.

Hahahaha. Yeah. First blobber ever not to have full dialogue trees.

 

[Infinitron]

Turns out I made a mistake and don't have beta access, so y'all will have to wait to hear my brilliant and universally respected hands-on observations.

You have alpha access, don't you? That means you automatically have the beta too, I'm pretty sure.

 

[Strange Fellow]

RPG where the dialogue window is just a large button saying "continue"... this is fucking ridiculous and will fail miserably.

 

[aweigh]

That one guy managed to make it a whole hour into the first three games! Except he clarified that in KoD he only managed to make it 25 minutes.

Also it's cool to know Dark Souls invented metroidvanias and bionic commandos. And zelda. And also both the Adventure Game and RPG genres. All that shit created by Miyazaki's talented studio.

EDIT: Actually I'm pretty sure From Soft invented polygons too.

 

[Dodo1610]

Aren't blobber supposed to be all about fighting in dungeons, if so why bother with full voice acting and facial animation.

 

[theSavant]

Can someone with low end gpu (gt 1030) test the game and report if playable at highest settings FullHD?

 

[Strange Fellow]

Some thoughts on character creation:

• The dwarves are just as tall as the other races! 0/10, stay away!
• The skill tree looks a lot like Witcher 3 to me, complete with only allowing you to equip a few abilities at a time, as well as having to put a certain number of points into a category before you're allowed to advance to the next level of the tree. Hopefully there are some fun synergies to be discovered.
• I wonder if the "attack" and "defense" categories are the same for every archetype. I'm guessing they are.
• I did not see a way to change a character's stats in the 49-minute video, nor to see what effect they have (though stuff like constitution and AC are self-explanatory), and a few of the trees seem to be simple stat-ups. With only one skill point per level, I doubt those are going to be very enticing.
• I'm assuming that "Brewing" for Bards and "Crafting" for other classes are just going to be unlockable recipes. Again, you'll have to sacrifice new exciting active abilities at a level-up for this. They had better make the passives worth picking up.

Oh yeah, and the shiny bright blue quest marker is just as as expected. That thing will be optional, or else turned off in the actual dungeons, right? ...right?

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Those previews.

 

[Strange Fellow]

Man, the D:OS experience just came screaming back to me at the sight of that crafting interface.
There are people here with beta access, right? Looking forward to hearing some impressions that don't start with "combat in BT4 is turn-based."

 

[aweigh]

I wonder if stages will have interlocking passages like in my Dark Souls games. Hopefully one won't have to do tedious busywork creating characters and leveling them up and the game will do it for you; that should be the best upgrade possible from those old games this is based on... well that and modern controller support, of course!

 

[theSavant]

I don't like everything what I see...

The core system seems OK (combat, skills, races, stats, items), which should make me happy - no?

Not really. I'm always looking at the whole package. And every time I look at the ingame footage the visuals turn me off - which is the UI, the 3d models, the environment. It's all so ugly, weird, and often looks like PS1 graphics. What the hell? I mean you got Unreal Engine 4! Damn! It somehow even looks worse than Wiz8 (which was at least clean and consistent). Unreal Engine my ass! But to be fair, this is not the game engine's fault.

Now I understand why sometimes isometric view is better. The distant view can be very forgiving for failed artwork and aesthetics. That said, Numanuma was nice and detailed. BT4 however looks "meh". But when you think about it, it's logical: inXile mostly made isometric games in their past, so they got plenty of experience in that type of game. BT4 however is a first person game, and they got no experience in that type of game. Probably some people were right at the beginning of the kickstarter: BT4 would have been better as an isometric game. I didn't think I would admit that one day...

 

[Grauken]

Man, the D:OS experience just came screaming back to me at the sight of that crafting interface.
There are people here with beta access, right? Looking forward to hearing some impressions that don't start with "combat in BT4 is turn-based."

I rather play it 2 to 3 years after release, after the enchanced edition has been fully patched

 

[Shadenuat]

Aren't blobber supposed to be all about fighting in dungeons, if so why bother with full voice acting and facial animation.

They're just a style of RPG. Blobber can be as much Full Scale RPG TM as any other style. Even when focused heavily on combat.

 

[sstacks]

I'm still waiting for The Grognard's Tale

 

[Zombra]

There are people here with beta access, right? Looking forward to hearing some impressions that don't start with "combat in BT4 is turn-based."

Particularly interested in Nekot-The-Brave's analysis.

 

[sstacks]

I didn't get in on the beta of this one like an idiot, instead went for the level that came with a copy of Torment TON as well

 

[theSavant]

• I did not see a way to change a character's stats in the 49-minute video, nor to see what effect they have (though stuff like constitution and AC are self-explanatory), and a few of the trees seem to be simple stat-ups. With only one skill point per level, I doubt those are going to be very enticing.

Yeah. Looks like most stats can't be upped, except some selected ones via the skill-tree. The fighter has 4 nodes in the skill tree to upgrade +1 Str or so (saw that in a screenshot). Not that much. Better than nothing though.

 

[aweigh]

inb4 game has less depth than 35 year old Wizardry scenarios.

EDIT: and also 35 year old BT scenarios as well, yes.

 

[Zombra]

Looks like most stats can't be upped, except some selected ones via the skill-tree. The fighter has 4 nodes in the skill tree to upgrade +1 Str or so (saw that in a screenshot). Not that much. Better than nothing though.

Something to bear in mind, this isn't one of the old school RPGs where stats go up to 100 or something. When your strength starts at 4, getting it up to 6 or 8 by the end of the game is a huge increase.